IV—HEALTH, HUMANITY AND PROCEDURE

What were already glaring national ills before the war will, afterwards, be ills demanding the most immediate, sustained, and resolute attention.

There exists in America a vehicle called the “rubber-neck” car, in which the tourist is taken and shown the interesting features of the neighbourhood. Before the political machine settles down again to work, legislators, editors, business men, writers—we might all with profit take a round trip and see again evils that our country has never really faced in the past, but will have to face, and grievously swollen at that, in the future. At the back of all lack of effort is lack of realization. Statistics of national problems may foster an impersonal and scientific attitude, but they do nothing to supply the feeling from which alone comes driving force.

Take our slums! The powers vested in the State or in local bodies for dealing with slum areas are obviously either not sufficient or not sufficiently put to use. Not, of course, that any quick or light-hearted transformation can be expected; the roots of this evil are too tortuously coiled in economies and natural selfishness.

Still, just as realization of our country’s danger at the hands of Germany has produced a marvellous crop of effort and sacrifice, so realization of the equally distressing menace to the country from within should produce something similar, when patriotic attention is once more free, and time and strength at liberty, for fighting dangers at home.

The housing problem desperately needs attention; but, though much can be done, good gamblers cut their losses, and the adult generation of the slums has got more or less to be cut, that greater effort may be concentrated on the children.

The war has focussed attention on the need for arresting infant mortality. Good! But there is little use in saving babies if you are not going to feed them decently when they are out of swaddling clothes. A big step forward has been taken of late years towards the feeding of necessitous children, both at school and in crêches but many more steps need to be taken. If this is not a State matter, then nothing is. To neglect the nourishment of its children is at once the paltriest economy, the least sagacious policy, and the worst inhumanity of which a nation can be guilty. The old-fashioned idea that children must go hungry or be fed so as to grow up rickety because their parents (being “rotters” already) must not be rotted further is a doctrine devoid both of common sense and compassion. A nation either has a will towards a future, or it has none. If it has none, for what are we fighting this most bloody war? What does our honour matter, or our independence either? But the future of a nation is its children. As they grow up, healthy, clean, hopeful, efficient, so will our future be. As they grow up—half-fed, dirty, don’t care, and ignorant—so will Britain! If to look after the children makes worse paupers of the parents, well—let it! Have some courage. Do not be hypnotized by a word, and, grasping the shadow, lose the substance. Give the children blood in their little bodies, and hope in their little brains. Any decent parent will be the better for that; the indecent parent is a loss already, and must be cut. Working-class mothers who neglect to feed their children better than themselves are but exceptions, nor will a sounder system of State-help seriously alter the deepest instinct of human nature. The heroism of British soldiers in the trenches is no greater than the lifelong heroism of British mothers in the slums struggling against want. This is a matter that should not be left to the discretion of local bodies. Once the principle has been admitted—and who can honestly deny that it has?—the rest should be simply a question of fact medically certified not here and there, but all over the country. Either it is justice and wisdom to feed the children, or it is not, and the scruples, however philosophical, of gentlemen prepared to watch other people’s children go hungry should not any longer be indulged.

The estimated number of school children in England and Wales being fed by the State in 1911-1912 was 230,000 out of a school population of 5,357,367. The estimated number of this school population showing signs of malnutrition is variously given at from 10 to 20 per cent. Taking it at 15 per cent., or 800,000 children, we have more than half a million school children wanting meals and not getting them. This is appalling. There is no other word for it. But when the children under school age who need food and are not getting it, are added to this number, the proportions of this national folly and inhumanity stagger the brain. It does not yet seem to be grasped that these children, who are fighting not only against insufficiency of proper food, but against bad air and bad housing, grow up with so much per cent. knocked off their national value. A stitch in time is supposed to save nine. A pound spent on the age of growth brings back many pounds from the age of stability. To those few who ride the doctrine of Liberty to the death of national health it may simply be said: So long as you have no hope of repealing compulsory education, you have no right to let children receive it in an unfit condition. Education and decent nourishment are inseparable; and decent nourishment is as necessary in the years that come before as in the years of schooling. No! In reality the principle is now rooted, and, like other things, it’s all a question of money. But a country with a capital of £16,000,000,000 and an income of £2,100,000,000 cannot really afford to allow this state of affairs to continue—especially after the gold-letting of this war. The state our national finances will be in makes it all the more imperative that we should have a well-nourished and efficient population, or we shall never get out of the slough.

During this war our heroism has jibbed at Liquor. That jovial monster looms nearly as large as ever. We shall have a National Debt after the war of three or four thousand millions, perhaps more. And yet the cheapest thing that could possibly be done, in the long run, would be to increase it and buy up the Liquor Trade; achieve that dream of Joseph Chamberlain, “the total and absolute elimination of any idea of private gain in the retail sale of liquor”; convert drink into food to the tune of some eighty millions a year; and vastly diminish the number of children that require State nourishment, and the number of underfed men and women. In 1911, £162,797,229 was the drink bill of the nation; of which it is estimated that about £110,000,000 was spent by the working class. The working classes are no more inclined to liquor than the rest of the population, but they have obviously less to spare for the indulgence of their inclination. With proper control of the liquor traffic they will perhaps spend half what they spend now, extracting therefrom just as much enjoyment, and most of the other half will go into the bodies of themselves and their children in the form of food.

Before the war one-tenth of our people were getting too little food; two-tenths more just balanced on a knife-edge of bare sufficiency. And the great majority of this third of our population were too closely or too badly housed for health.

What is it going to be—after—unless our measures in regard to food, to housing, and to drink, are heroic? For heroic measures we shall need a keener sense of justice, a larger humanity, than we have ever had. Though the war may conceivably not diminish humane feeling in those who fight, it blunts the sensibilities of those who do not see its horrors at first-hand. Tales of others’ sufferings have become the daily fodder of the brain; narratives of death and misery the companions of every hour. Alongside the brutalities and agonies of the war, the injustice and cruelties of normal civil live seem pale and tame. Man has only a certain capacity for feeling; one expects callousness now towards civil inhumanities. But must that callousness last after peace has come? If so, we are in a bad way.

What is it that our modern State is reaching after? Presumably health, and balance. And what are these qualities built on, if not on Justice? At the back of all social inhumanities will be found a lack of reasonable freedom and opportunity for some people, and the possession in other people of too much freedom and opportunity. And for the swift redress of social cruelties, the thorough attainment of social justice, we have at present not only to contend with human nature, but with an admitted deficiency in our legislative machinery.

When the chief obstacle to laws is not the callousness of public opinion, but a mere block on the lines of procedure, some drastic change is due, a new departure wanted. Before the war many measures of reform hung in the wind year after year, not because there was no public feeling behind them, not even because there were the usual political cleavages concerning them, but simply because time could not be found in which to pass them. Of such were: Measures for the feeding and education of children; the control of drink; rural housing; improvement of slum areas; furtherance of the minimum wage; reform of the Poor Law; of the Divorce Law; of the disability that attends the needy in their access to civil justice; of the imprisonment of poor persons for debt; of the procedure in regard to pauper lunatics; of the prison system; of provision for the blind; measures for the better treatment of animals. All these and others hung in the wind; are they to go on hanging those when the war is over? Wanted before, they will be wanted still more badly then, because the general conditions of life will for some years, perhaps many years, be harder; and economic pressure fosters rough and unjust treatment.

Is it too early for a united effort, to think out, in readiness for peace, a scheme of parliamentary procedure which shall afford time for the serious and uninterrupted consideration of non-party measures, and the furtherance of needed reforms?

Party no longer exists, but they who think it has gone for good dwell in a fools’ paradise. As sure as fate it will spring up again, because it is rooted in temperamental difference. But must it come back with all its old cat-and-dog propensities, and waste of national time? It will, unless some method be devised that will remove some of party’s unhandsome opportunities and save it from itself. Politicians alone know the difficulties, many and great, in the way of a better procedure. Surely, while faction is in abeyance, Parliament will set its wits to overcoming those difficulties, so that when the war ends we may not witness again the tedious and distressful blocking of so many needed measures that prevailed aforetime. Party was made for the Country, not the Country for Party; and what was tolerated with Job-like patience before this vast upheaval is not by any means likely to be tolerated after. Needs will be more insistent; the sense of reality much greater; the aspiration towards National Health a live thing, because it will be so desperately necessary.

Reform of parliamentary procedure is obviously the prime precedent for national reform. Shall not then the question be even now given all the attention that can be spared to it? What better moment—when men of all parties are filled with the one great thought—Our Country!